SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Altera Corporation (NASDAQ:
ALTR) today announced the release of SerialLite II, a lightweight serial interconnect protocol for chip-to-chip, board-to-board and backplane applications. Optimized for the Stratix(R) II GX device family, the SerialLite II protocol builds on the success of the first-generation SerialLite protocol by supporting a performance range of 622 Mbps to 6.375 Gbps while reducing logic requirements by an average of 65 percent. SerialLite II delivers a low-cost serial interconnect solution for a wide array of applications, including voice, data and video communication, test and medical, defense, industrial, high-end computing and data storage.

"We worked very closely with our original SerialLite customers to define and develop this second-generation serial protocol," said Justin Cowling, Altera's director of IP marketing. "By understanding the unique requirements of different applications over a widening range of performance points, we were able to define a low-latency, low-overhead protocol with a wider set of configurable features to drive down implementation costs for each customer."

About SerialLite II

SerialLite II is a point-to-point serial interconnect protocol based on industry-standard 8b/10b encoding, scalable from 1 to 16 lanes at 622 Mbps to 6.375 Gbps per lane, for chip-to-chip, board-to-board and backplane applications. The protocol includes a flexible architecture to support full-duplex (symmetric), simplex, asymmetric and broadcast operation, and support for either streaming or packet data. For more information on SerialLite II, including the protocol specification, visit
www.altera.com/seriallite2.

Pricing and Availability

The SerialLite II interconnect protocol is available as a MegaCore(R) function which can be downloaded from Altera's website (
www.altera.com/seriallite2download). A perpetual license for the MegaCore including one year of upgrades and support is bundled with each subscription of the Quartus(R) II design software. The annual subscription for the Altera design software is $2,000 for a node-locked PC license.

About Stratix II GX FPGAs

The 90-nm Stratix II GX family is Altera's third generation of FPGAs with embedded transceivers. The family is part of a complete programmable solution from Altera aimed at the growing number of applications and protocols requiring high-speed serial interconnect. Stratix II GX devices share the same groundbreaking architecture as Altera's high-density Stratix II FPGAs and integrate up to 20 serializer/deserializer (SERDES)-based transceivers. For more information about Stratix II GX FPGAs, please visit
www.altera.com/stratix2gx.

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